interest

My question today is who benefits the most from the belief that the bible is the infallible word of God?

My answer is that the publishing companies benefit the most from the perpetuation of this belief (myth), and have perhaps even more interest in this than your average believer. Why? Because the myth encourages people not just to buy one copy, indiscriminately, but to buy multiple copies to compare to one another (to really discover what is really there). It also creates the paranoia that one doesn't have the "right" translation, that maybe this translation was good when I was fifteen, but now that I'm 22 I need to buy a more "literal" translation, or what I really need is something paraphrased, annotated, expanded. Without the belief that there is a real truth in the text that needs to be translated properly, the industry would never be able to support as many different translations in English as it does. What other text supports this many translations?

Part of the difference is that the bible has been translated into English more than any other work in a foreign language. But while I could name 15 different translations of the bible, I could name a maximum of two translations for any other work (Constance Garnett and Richard Pevear translating Crime and Punishment, for instance). The interesting thing here is that no one knows who translated the translations of the bible. Certainly, they're listed in the credits, but if anyone in my church could name one bible translator except Eugene Peterson, I would be shocked. The benefit of this (to publishers) is that it provides the illusion that something objective is being captured. The translator is hidden because we are supposed to forget that it is a translated work (and because there are usually a lot of translators).

Of course, money is just one type of benefit, and I'm sure there are many people who maintain their own power by perpetuating the myth. But I'm coming to see text as commodity, and more observant to the ways in which the object of the text is advertised and sold. It's unavoidable that text is designed to sell. Once again, lets think of bible versions, of which there is a huge plethora to supply any translation in any shape and format. Each is designed to interest a certain buyer, whether that buyer wants features or the illusion of the text on its own without features or commentary (the stark, leather covered "The Holy Bible" bible is just as designed to appeal, as it simultaneously claims to be avoiding all forms of appeal).

In what house are there so many copies of the same book? Everyone needs a personal copy of the bible.

This is significant to me in some ways because the rise of the printing press coincided with modernity and its conceptions of truth as objective, factual, literal.